Fabrizio De André, the revered Italian singer/songwriter, created a deep and enduring body of work over the course of his career from the 1960s through the 1990s. With these translations I have tried to render his words into an English that reads naturally without straying too far from the Italian. The translations decipher De André's lyrics without trying to preserve rhyme schemes or to make the resulting English lyric work with the melody of the song.

The album begins with sailors returning to Genoa, strolling back to their familiar homes on the cobbled paths that lead to and from the sea. ("Sweet and sour 'hare-of-the-tiles' pie" is actually cat pie, cats being referred to as roof bunnies.)

Mauro Pagani and Fabrizio De André

Shadows of faces, faces of sailors,
where do you come from, where is it you’re going?

From a place where the moon shows itself naked
and the night has pointed a knife at our throat,

and God remains to mount the donkey
and the Devil is in heaven and makes his nest there,

we come in from the sea to dry out at Andrea's place,
at the fountain of the doves in the stone house.

And in the stone house, whoever will be there
in the house of Andrea, who isn’t a sailor -

people of Lugano, faces like pickpockets,
those who prefer the wing of the sea bass,

family girls, smelling good,
whom you can watch without condoms.

And to these empty stomachs, what will he give them?
Things to drink, things to eat,

fried fish, a white Portofino,
lamb brains in the same wine,

four-sauce lasagna to cut,
sweet and sour hare-of-the-tiles pie.

And in a boat of wine we’ll navigate the perils,
emigrants of laughter with nails in our eyes,

until the morning grows able to gather him up,
brother of the cloves and of the girls,

master of the rope, rotten from water and salt
that binds and carries us on a cobbled sea path.

Creuza de mä received both critical and popular acclaim upon its release. David Byrne told Rolling Stone that Creuza de mä was one of the ten most important works of the Eighties. The album grew out of a deep collaboration between Mauro Pagani, founding member of PFM, and De André. Pagani had been studying Mediterranean musics - Balkan, Greek, Turkish - and De André suggested that they make a Mediterranean album together, partly as an act of identity and a declaration of independence from the strains of Anglo-American music that were then dominant: rock, pop and electronic music. De André once stated that "music should be a cathartic event, but today's music is only amphetamine-like, and enervating." While granting that Americans made great music that he too was influenced by, he felt there were different ways and different roots that were being smothered by the mass commercialization and success of American popular music; Creuza de mä was to be a synthesis of Mediterranean sounds, and it was indeed a stark contrast to the music of the time. De André's lyrics are in Genovese, a dialect that over the centuries absorbed many Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Spanish, French and even English words, and Pagani's music combined folk instruments (oud, shehnai, doumbek, bazouki, bağlama) with contemporary instrumentation, including Synclavier, creating what might be called an ethnic/pop masterpiece.